Gallery & Studio's Review of St. Peter's Living
Room Gallery Exhibit
Lexington Avenue
New York, New York

There is the suggestion of spiritual rebirth in the title of Donna Sinisgalli's
recent exhibition, "Emerging from the Dark Months." Whether the
title alludes to the coming of spring after the long bleak winter, the city's
recovery from the tragedy of September 11th, the artist's triumph over some
personal crisis, or a combination of all three, the fact that her show takes
place through June 24 (2002) in the Living Room Gallery at St. Peter's Church,
619 Lexington Ave., only adds to the sense of spirituality that enlivened
the exhibition. It also seems auspicious that Saint Peter's is known for its
"Jazz Vespers," since Sinisgalli imbues her subjects with heightened
coloristic intensities and subtle rhythms in such a manner that jazz musicians
inflect familiar melodies with something unexpected and wondrously new.

In Sinisgalli's oil on canvas "Lush
Garden" for example, a variety of flowers enliven verdant foliage,
each delineated with piquant clarity of separate notes in a Miles Davis trumpet
solo. Yet, the overall composition flows rhythmically, for Sinisgalli is able
to be marvelously descriptive without succumbing to fussiness, suggesting
a movement and vitality that we usually encounter mainly in looser painterly
modes.

Similarly, in "Tranquil
Lake," Sinisgalli orchestrates the myriad small strokes that describe
blades of grass, miniscule flowers, shrubbery, and the movement of light across
the surface of the water, to create a sweeping composition that dazzles one
with its freshness and immediacy with the sense of a precise, fleeting moment
in time captured and made immutable.

Conversely in the larger oil "Sweet Breeze," Sinisgalli focuses
in more closely on dense concentrations of boldly painted flowers and leaves,
employing the sensual outlines of vibrant red, yellow, and purple tulips,
in a field to create strong compositional rhythms. In the curving forms of
the green leaves, delineated in bold strokes, she makes us sense the movement
of the unseen breeze in a composition that, while faithful in its details
to the actual appearances of the flowers themselves, has an expressive thrust
that shows a kinship to predecessors such as van Gogh and Munch. Sinisgalli
has obviously studied such masters of Expressionism and she applies their
lessons well. It is equally clear, however, that her main teacher is nature
itself, which she has observed closely in pictures such as "A
Sea of Tulips," a medium sized horizontal composition showing a field
of tulips seemingly receding into infinity, and "A
Spring Garden," a smaller oil in which tiny flowers appear to parade
in orderly rows across a sloping hill enclosed by a rugged stone fence.

Here, as in other pictures in this engaging and exuberant exhibition, Donna
Sinisgalli paints with a restrained passion that heightens her natural subjects
without distorting them. Indeed, the respect, even reverence, that she shows
for each individual element in nature makers her canvases fairly glow with
conviction